A Woman Named Smith eBook

Our cat was Mrs. Belinda Black, and her children were
Potty Black and Sir Thomas More Black, this last being
a creature of noble mien and a meditative turn of
mind.

“Homage and praise to Bast, the cat-headed,
the wise one, the great goddess!” purred Alicia,
stroking Mrs. Belinda Black’s satiny head.
“And may Sekhet the Cat of the Sun aid me, a
devotee at her shrine, to butter the paws of some
two-legged cats in Hyndsville!”

“You-all’s dinnah ’s waitin’.”
Mary Magdalen stubbornly held to the notion that any
meal eaten between breakfast and night was dinner;
lunch being sandwiches and fried chicken taken out
of a basket at church picnics and eaten out of one’s
hand, or lap, for choice. “What was de
text to-day, Miss Sophy? Ah sort o’ likes
to chaw easy on a mout’ful o’ text whilst
Ah ‘m washin’ up mah dishes.”

We gave her the text, which happened to be one that
fills every negro’s heart with undiluted joy:
“O ye dry bones, hear the word of the Lord.”
And we had the satisfaction of hearing her rolling
out, to the clatter of pans and pots:

while we went up-stairs to change our frocks.
We were still sharing one room then, finding it more
convenient. And there, in front of our door,
in a nest of ferns and mosses, was a great cluster
of wild flowers, summer’s last and autumn’s
first children. They had been gathered in no
ordered garden, but taken from the skirts of the fields
and the bosom of the woods; and Carolina the opulent,
the beautiful, the free-handed, does not deck herself
niggardly.

Alicia’s face that had been so wistful lighted
with a sudden joy. She gave a happy cry:

“Ariel!” she cried, “Ariel!
Oh, what a heavenly thing, what a human thing
to do! And to-day, too, just when we need a little
bit of friendliness!” She looked around with
a queer, shy smile.

“Ariel!” she called, “Ariel, no
matter who comes, or goes, or what happens in Hynds
House, we believe in you. Don’t leave
us, Ariel! Maker of music, bringer of blossoms,
stay!”

CHAPTER V

“THY NEIGHBOR AS THYSELF”

Mr. Nicholas Jelnik, with an uplift of his fine black
brows and a satirical smile, once diagnosed the case
of Great-Aunt Sophronisba Scarlett as “congenital
Hyndsitis”; Doctor Richard Geddes said you’d
only to take a glance at her house to see that she
was predestined to be damned. I know that she
was so hidebound in her prejudices, so virulently
conservative, so constitutionally opposed to change,
that anything savoring of modernity was anathema to
her.